Taking proper care of a Pen Drive / USB Drive

well guys now a days pen drives are really cheap and have become most sought after ways of data transfer. below are some points to just have a look at

1. life
only thing(apart from normal wear and tear) the affects life of a usb drive is write cycles.
u can read data from a drive any no of times u want but writing a data to it will decrease its life by a bit.writing includes deleting/defragmenting etc.thus unless sufficient space is not left in ur drive for ur new file , DONOT delete old data from it , just insert more new data.

2 defragment
unlike normal hard disks wid moving spidles , pen drives do not have slow and fast zones.data kept anywhere will be read at same speed in a pen drive.thus NEVER defrag ur pen drive as it introduces one more write cycle and reduce life of ur pen drive (by just a little bit).
also usb drives don't have any head that needs to move its position (thus wasting time to read a fragmented file on an a hard drive drive)
so no need whatsoever to defrag ur usb(or any other solid state drives)


3. safely remove ur external drive
well speed of hd is much faster than pen drivethus when u transfer data to ur pen drive , to speed things up , some of the data may be "cached" by ur os.
thus when the dialogue box showing file transfer to pen drive has vanished , the data may not have been completely written to pen drive.that is why whenever u copy something to ur pen drive u must always make sure that u "safely remove the hardware" just to be sure that all data has been transferred.
when u are reading from ur pen drive , no such thing occurs , thus the moment the transfer dialog is complete , u can simply take out ur pen drive without any fear of data corruption.
thus always "safely remove hardware" when u copy something to ur pen drive , else it is not necessary

4. file systems
default is fat 32some guys prefer ntfs , linux geeks may try out ext3.
well these journaled file systems carry no real benefit in terms of data security.but they have a lot of overhead in terms of journaling , keeping extra record bout files etc.
this again introduces useless write cycles which again is bad for life for ur pen drive

5. viruses
these can be avoided bya-> using linuxb-> using hips(comodo defence+)
else on windows , always disable autorun of removable drives from "tweakui"also keep anti virus updated .
well if u must , transfer data from a pc u know is already "infected"(college pc/net cafe's) then
1. shut down "infected" pc2. boot into ubuntu installer's live disk3. now attach ur pen drive and transfer data happily!!
or else if u can , make urself a bootable ubuntu pen drive.simply boot into it and do what u want fearlessly